303 Gallery is pleased to present our third solo exhibition with Nick Mauss. For this exhibition, Mauss creates a mirrored garden in the gallery, in which his singular relationship to the line of drawing moves across and through space and mediums.

Mauss' work takes the mode of drawing, found at the interstices of various media, processes, and histories, and dilates, twists, folds, intensifies, and loosens those gaps to produce a different mode of making art.

Here, the viewer is guided into the exhibition by a serpentine railing, and upon arriving in the gallery space, finds a room shimmering in reflections and refractions of lines and forms. Mauss has been working in his own form of verre eglomisé for the past year, as he was developing a series of “intervals” within the Florine Stettheimer retrospective at the Lenbachhaus in Munich. The mirrored glass paintings have a way of puncturing the spaceof giving the viewer the sense of being there and not being there at the same time. They also actlike Mauss' drawings in the pastas filters through which a wide net of sensibilities and art-historical rewirings are brought into the room. In a different material, Mauss takes lines and outputs them as body-sized steel filigree, which itself is drawn over again and again, in acrylic and pastel powder.

All of these individual works layer on top of and through each other, as Mauss orchestrates the space as he would a drawing on paper. For Mauss, the initial intimacy of the drawing is a tenuous and un-spoken wondering of the viewer, of objects, glances, forms and lines in a simultaneous process of formation and falling apart.

In 2014, Nick Mauss presented works within the Florine Stettheimer retrospective at the Lenbachhaus, Munich and in Portraits d?Intérieurs at Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. He also staged a performance, 1NVERS1ONS, working with the Northern Ballet and the National Youth Ballet, and the performance of texts and music by Kim Gordon and Juliana Huxtable, as part of Frieze Projects, London. An artist's book has been created to accompany this work. Mauss also presented a new piece as part of Art Basel Unlimited in 2014. Other recent solo presentations of his works were realized at Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2014); Fiorucci Art Trust, London (2014); kim?, Riga (2012) and Indipendenza Studio, Rome (2012). Mauss was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2012 and Greater New York, MoMA PS1 in 2010, and has participated in group exhibitions at institutions including Kunsthaus Bregenz (2013); The Walker Art Center (2011); The Hessel Museum of Art, Bard Center for Curatorial Studies (2010); Kunsthalle Basel (2010); Kunsthalle Zurich (2009) and Le Magasin, Grenoble (2008). A launch of Nick Mauss and Ken Okiishi's Artist Web Project for the Dia Art Foundation is planned for April 16, 2015. Mauss lives and works in New York.

Curated by Rachel Weingeist
We are pleased to present En Voz Alta (Aloud), an exhibition of works by ten Cuban-born artists: María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Alberto Casado, Duvier del Dago, Meira Marrero & José Toirac, Liudmila & Nelson, Yunier Hernandez, Armando Mariño, Douglas Pérez Castro, Reynerio Tamayo and Elio Rodríguez – seven living in Havana, two in the United States and one in Europe.
The steady erosion of the United States embargo against Cuba, since 2009, has given hope to many there and abroad that normalization between the two countries is possible. On the island, opportunity, or the perception of it, are more plentiful than ever. Many Cubans are celebrating the potential bounty, hoping that electronic connectivity and open trade are now or soon will be within reach.
The educational system in Cuba has produced prolific and undeniable talent whose artwork is now being lauded by art critics, curators and collectors as the best-kept secret in the art market today. The process of passing on a lineage under the Cuban system of student to artist to professor is as persistent and durable as Cuban culture itself.
En Voz Alta “gives sudden voice to an easy coupling of artists,” according to Rachel Weingeist, the curator, who wanted to respond to “the emotions that Cuban artists are expressing – generated by the recent political shifts.”
Everyone wants to know what is next in Cuba’s future. Perhaps artist duo Meira Marrero and José Toirac’s tarot card deck, bound in leather of 24 cards, titled Profile, will shed light. This work is charged with symbols inspired by the iconic interview that resulted in “One Hundred Hours with Fidel,” the infamous tell-all in the words of the Revolutionary himself, published in 2006.
In this exhibition, as art often manifests, humor and the realities of daily routine are intertwined. All of the artists in this show are influenced by current and recent political events: Douglas Perez’s painting, “December 17th in the White House,” refers to President Obama’s announcing the restoration of a diplomatic relationship with Cuba, and we witness Michelle and Barack Obama dancing on a banquet table, dishes flying in celebration. Duvier del Dago, well known for his light and string drawings, positions a larger-than-life nude Cubana at a podium set in a futuristic public square, orating to a raucous and fictional crowd. María Magdalena Campos-Pons, revered for her sensual imagery, offers “Unspeakable Sorrow,” a ceremonial black-on-black portrait of despair, loss and abandonment, a howl, in which the flowering Amaryllis is the only trace of life or color.
Rachel Weingeist is a contemporary curator and cultural advisor who has curated over twenty-five Cuban exhibitions that range in theme and scale. Over the last five years, Weingeist built the largest private Cuban art collection to date and created the first contemporary Cuban video archive, which has traveled widely. She is a member of the Harvard Cuban Studies Advisory Board and actively participates internationally in cultural and political dialogue.
Image: Duvier del Dago, The Story Belongs to the One Telling It, 2014 Watercolor & Ink on Paper 28 x 39 inches

The Korean word “Huh-Shim(허심-虛 心)” is translated as modesty in English, though it is more associated with an attitude of behavior, manner or appearance intended to avoid impropriety in English word. Soonja Kang’s usage Huh-Shim, in which she uses as a title in all of her paintings, differs in a sense that it has more to do with a state of being in emptying out your mind.

Clipper is part of an ongoing project entitled Reflective Nostalgia after the term coined by Svetlana Boym. The project is a series of looping, non-narrative videos, each attempting to convey the texture and melancholy of memory — the interstices of life — rather than specific remembered events. The unsentimental recollections are created from the ground up, using computer animation software. The CGI software imparts an uncanny, dreamlike imagery to the simulacrum of life. Adam Hurwitz’s experience as a painter has guided the work and the resulting videos exist somewhere between painting and film.

Clipper is based on the memory, and near universal experience, of radio towers seen from the highway during summer road trips. The viewer endlessly loops around the blinking, monumental masts in lazy circles at twilight.

Davana Wilkins Revival

Feb 19 - Mar 21, 2015

This solo-exhibition uses breath (and semi-living objects) as a way to talk about the conversion of energy.

Taking inspiration from syfi-novels and pseudo-science, Davana Wilkins uses her artwork to explore the nature of consciousness among both sentient beings and physical objects. Through the trasference of spirit, energy and essence, her forms comment on the notion that life is more than just an interaction of physical material, but an amalgamation of conscious thought.

This solo-exhibition uses breath as a way to talk about the conversion of energy. In Revival, Wilkins’ brother’s breathing patterns as he speaks in tongues are used to animate an organic form. While this piece demonstrates the vigorous movement of the body, breath and spirit, Anaerobic instead explores the slow exhale. In an effort to capture her grandmother’s fading essence, the artist collected her breath into tanks, then slowly released the air into clear seedpod forms. Eventually the air will leak from these forms, dissipating her grandmother’s essence into its surroundings.

Peter Fankhauser A Quarrelling Pair

Feb 19 - Mar 21, 2015

A Quarrelling Pair reimagines American author Jane Bowles’ play of the same name through a shift in representational format.

The exhibitions coming to Agora Gallery this February represent a collection of talent from artists from around the world. The works in Figuratively Speaking will elegantly represent unadulterated reality, and blend representational fact with fiction, abstracting or rearranging scenes through manipulation of color, perspective, texture, and structure. The artists featured in Elemental Realms each push the envelope when it comes to texture and technique, using their aesthetic achievements to entice viewers into their unattainable realities and redefine reality on their own terms. A solo exhibition entitled, Project 13: Ghass Rouzkhosh presents the artwork of an acclaimed artist whose abstract four-color paintings draw from a personal history of war, violence, tragedy, and hope.

The collective exhibitions open on February 10th and run until March 3rd, 2015. Project 13 will run from February 13th - March 3rd. The opening reception for all three shows will take place on Thursday, February 12th from 6-8 PM, and will be open to the public.

Agora Gallery is a contemporary fine art gallery located in the heart of Chelsea’s fine art district in New York. Established in 1984, Agora Gallery specializes in connecting art dealers and collectors with national and international artists. The art gallery’s expert consultants are available to assist corporate and private clients in procuring original artwork to meet their organization’s specific needs and budget requirements. With a strong online presence and popular online gallery, ARTmine, coupled with the spacious and elegant physical gallery space, the work of our talented artists, who work in diverse media and styles, can receive the attention it deserves. Over the years Agora Gallery has sponsored and catered to special events aimed at fostering social awareness and promoting the use of art to help those in need.

Alexander and Bonin is pleased to announce Jonathas de Andrade’s first one-person exhibition in North America. The installations, sculpture and photographic works to be exhibited date from 2013 to 2015 and address socio-economic issues in contemporary Brazil.

In two multi-part installations, (Cartazes para o Museu do Homem do Nordeste and 40 nego bom é 1 real), both from 2013, Andrade questions the influential but controversial ideas of the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, particularly as expressed in his 1933 publication Casa-Grande e Senzala (The Master and the Slave). In this text, Freyre suggests a lived experience of racial-democracy in Brazil, which he believed to be a result of miscegenation between Portuguese colonizers, Africans, and Native Brazilians.

Cartazes para o Museu do Homem do Nordeste (Posters for the Museum of the Northeast Man) is inspired by an existing institution, the Museu do Homem do Nordeste, an anthropological museum in Recife, founded in 1979 and largely inspired by Gilberto Freyre’s theories on ‘racial democracy’. In this project Andrade visually reimagines the identity of the museum. Beginning in 2012 the artist advertised in local newspapers calling for workers interested in posing for photographs advertising the museum. Photographing participants in everyday situations, Andrade created 70 posters with notes documenting the encounters. Through this collection of images and notes Andrade examines how an anthropological approach influences the representation and understanding of cultural and personal identities. The artist continues to use the Museu do Homem do Nordeste as inspiration for parallel projects some of which can be seen in his survey exhibition currently at Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR) in Rio de Janeiro.

The title of the installation, (a collaborative project with Silvan Kaelin), 40 nego bom é 1 real (40 black candies for R$ 1,00), is drawn from the name of a popular candy in northeastern Brazil. ‘Nego bom’ which can be literally translated as ‘good black’ is a colloquial albeit affectionate term with colonial connotations. Inspired by a street vendor promoting his sweets at the top of his voice, the work consists of two parts and tells the story of the production of the sweet and exposes the falsity of the supposed good-natured working relations between employers and employees. Through this narrative Andrade probes the complex social dynamics of post-colonial Brazil through the locus of cheap labor.

In 2014 Andrade invited the workers from a refinery in Condado to participate in the creation of his most recent work, ABC de Cana, (Sugar Cane ABC). Inspired by a 1957 ‘alphabet’ drawing by Luis Jardim which uses sugar cane motifs, the work consists of 26 images of workers forming the alphabet with sugar cane stalks.

Jonathas de Andrade was born in 1982 in Maceió, Brazil; he lives and works in Recife. A survey of his work is on view at Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR), Rio de Janeiro through March 22. Past solo exhibitions include Instituto Cultural Itaú, São Paulo (2008); Instituto Cultural Banco Real, Recife (2009); Centro Cultural São Paulo (2010); Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo (2013, 2010); Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2013); and Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal (2013). He participated in the Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, (2009); São Paulo Biennial (2010); Istanbul Biennial (2011); New Museum Triennial: The Ungovernables, New York (2012); Lyon Biennial (2013) and the 11th Dakar Biennial (2014). Jonathas de Andrade's work was included in Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today at the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2014.

Anna Zorina Gallery is pleased to present Descendants featuring the artwork of Bradley Hart. The artist invented an elaborate sustainable system of creation that allows for the natural derivation of new work from the prior level of achievement. Stylistically varied, the works share an inherent procedural and conceptual lineage.

Overarching ideas and resourceful capability connect Hart's family of works into a dynamic legacy. The Injection pieces act as progenitors for each further scion. The artist chooses the unlikely support of bubble wrap, meticulously filling each bubble with acrylic paint. This results in seemingly pixelated images that allude to Impressionistic pointillism from a digital age perspective. Hart deliberately injects an excess amount of paint to guarantee that each color will drip down the reverse side of the bubble wrap. This resulting layer is carefully peeled away and becomes an independent work within the subsequent Impression series. These paintings appear to be glitch versions of the predecessor. With the next generation of works, the artist surrenders control resulting in the introduction of abstraction. Meanwhile, the pieces inherit evidence of the precise color-coding blueprint transferred from the initial Injection. In both the Created Waste and Wasted Paint series, acrylic remnants are removed from Hart's studio surfaces such as his floor, pallet, tools and mixing jars and further applied to canvas with a collage-like technique, ultimately capturing an aesthetic simultaneously reminiscent of both Pollock and Chamberlain. Created Waste works feature masses of paint made to mimic the natural byproducts of Hart's painting process through an Abstract Expressionist approach of purposeful yet uncontrolled application of media to unique surfaces. On the contrary, Wasted Paint paintings are comprised of remnants that are unintentionally formed, including splatters from the Created Waste series. Hart's organically interconnected oeuvre is the product of his constant mediation between control and surrender. His initial painstakingly systemic process evident in the photorealistic portraits gradually ebbs in objectivity and regulation to allow for more expressive and emotional abstract assemblages.

Hart reconstructs and reinterprets his personal memories within the context of his personal socio-historical perspective by preserving images of friends, celebrities, and notable places in bubble wrap. The formal variations that steadily emerge from each derivation refer to the plastic quality of memory encased in the virtual perception of contemporary life.

Asya Geisberg Gallery is pleased to present Jasper de Beijer's photographic series Mr. Knight's World Band Receiver. In his newest series, de Beijer adopts the visual detachment of an infamous hermit by recreating important historical events from his viewpoint. MKWBR is the twelfth conceptual project in the artist's oeuvre, which continually probes various modes of historical media representation. In each series, de Beijer begins with scale models sculpted from collaged hand-drawn materials, forming a unique combination of drawing, sculpture and photography. Whether about Dutch colonialism in the East Indies, the English Industrial Revolution, or the Mexican drug war, de Beijer's work remains true to each series' specific point of view.

MKWBR is inspired by the true story of Christopher Knight, who disappeared into the remote woods of Maine for twenty-seven years. He avoided any contact with the outside world, having only a radio as his source of information. Knight's imagination was untouched by visual media, and de Beijer tries to approximate this tabula rasa by relying on his own subjective perception of news events such as Chernobyl and Hurricane Katrina, avoiding his usual methodical research and instead using his memories to create an alternate version of reality.

De Beijer's scenes contain varying degrees of slippage from our own, media-saturated memories. This distance pushes his work into the realm of folklore or archetype, feeling familiar yet not quite accurate, as if a child has drawn his dreams. In “2-28-1993”, which envisions the conflagration at Waco, TX, the trees are more Brothers Grimm than Texan, and the night sky captures the mix of precision and crudeness that perfectly captures a solitary person's hyper-focus. The flames leap out in a cartoonishly menacing way, and the building itself is a vague symbol rather than a specific place.

Responding to Knight's echo-chamber of only living in his imagination, de Beijer re-enacts his failure to live in the world as it is, or rather as it is represented, and tries, perhaps in vain, to steer us to a wistful place where we sit around a fire and envision tales told by poets and adventurers. Knowing that unlike Christopher we can never erase being sullied by visual saturation, de Beijer nonetheless points to the power of images that occur as much in our personal interpretation as in the iconic reiterations of our media-deluged era.

Born and based in Amsterdam, Jasper de Beijer graduated from the Amsterdam School of the Arts and participated in the Autonomous Design graduate program at the Utrecht School of the Arts. His solo exhibitions include The Hague Museum of Photography, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, Museum Het Domein in Sittard (The Netherlands), Galerie Ron Mandos (Amsterdam), Gallery TZR-Kai Bruckner (Dusseldorf), Hamish Morisson Gallery (Berlin), the Empire Project (Istanbul) and Studio d'Arte Cannaviello (Milan). He is part of a large number of collections, including the Bank of America, the Gemeentemuseum (The Hague), and the Rabobank collection.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 3, 2015 – Berry Campbell is pleased to announce its first exhibition of the paintings of PERLE FINE (1905-1988). The exhibition will include thirteen important paintings and works on paper from the 1950s through the 1970s, including a several paintings from the “Cool Series,” 1961-1963. Berry Campbell announced their representation of the artist last month. The exhibition will be showcased at Berry Campbell on West 24th Street in Chelsea from February 12 through March 14, 2015.
Perle Fine was an artist at forefront of the Abstract Expressionist movement as it unfolded in New York and East Hampton, Long Island. Fine studied with Hans Hofmann and was a friend of Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, and other leading artists of the era. She gained recognition after World War II, when she received a grant from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and showed at both Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery and the Museum of Nonobjective Painting (now the Guggenheim Museum). Her first solo exhibition was held at Willard Gallery, New York, in 1945. Subsequently she showed at Betty Parsons Gallery and the Tanager Gallery, the first New York artist’s cooperative. In 1949, she was one of few women artists invited by de Kooning to join The Club, the intellectual artists’ group that he and Kline led. Fine’s work has recently received the attention it has long been due in exhibitions that provide new insight into Abstract Expressionism, including a traveling retrospective organized by Hofstra University in 2009.
Fine is represented in museums, colleges, and private collections across the country, including Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts; Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock; Ball State Museum of Art, Muncie, Indiana; Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art, Nashville, Tennessee; Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Guild Hall, East Hampton, New York; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; Hofstra University, Long Island, New York; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; New York University Art Collection; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York; Principia College, Saint Louis, Missouri; Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Massachusetts; Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; University of California Art Museum, Berkeley; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro; and Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts.
Perle Fine’s art adds to Berry Campbell’s prominent role as a showcase for established and mid-career artists in the modernist tradition, including Walter Darby Bannard, Dan Christensen, Raymond Hendler, Stephen Pace, William Perehudoff, Albert Stadler, and Syd Solomon.
.Berry Campbell is located in the heart of Chelsea at 530 W 24th Street on the ground floor. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 am to 6:00 pm or by appointment. For more information please contact Christine Berry or Martha Campbell at 212.924.2178, info@berrycampbell.com or www.berrycampbell.com.

BDG’s Winter Collective Part 2 will feature the works of François Bard, Peter Martensen, Stéphane E. Dumas, Frédéric Deprun and Matteo Pugliese. We welcome back Bard and Martensen after successful solo exhibitions at the gallery in early 2014. Both figurative artists are heavily inspired by history and the media but approach their human subjects in vastly different ways. Bard’s large scale, cropped oil on canvas paintings are bold and cinematic while Martensen’s eerie other worlds, which use a limited palette of subdued colors, border on science fiction.

Dumas’ large landscape paintings are distinguished by their ethereal blend of abstract and landscape genres. Deprun uses a hyper-realistic approach to play with scale; he often distorts and blurs his striking subjects. We introduced Pugliese’s bronze figurative sculptures to Chelsea this year and they were met with overwhelming success; his fragmented bronze men emerge from the gallery walls in pieces – a leg, a muscular arm, a foot appears from the unknown.

Spanish artist Amparo Sard uses a very unique form of physical pointillism to build an intricate pixilated image/narrative. By perforating the sheet of paper with thousands of pinholes using techniques borrowed and modified from fresco, the result is a wonderful and subtle white on white image - literally from within and through the sheet of paper. For her new body of work, Sard has added a think black component to some of her works on paper. It is made of rubber and silica. Amparo Sard stated in 2006 that her papers, obsessively pierced with pins, could be regarded from two perspectives; on the one hand, the elements purely shown (water, suitcase, tube, chair, branch, fly or woman) allow everyone to make their own free interpretation, and on the other hand, there is a subliminal language that connects the search for beauty to that which is sinister. She pursues the double, the mirror, the other side, and the mystery of everyday actions as parallel realities that never mix. In this work, we have two realities, the one represented by the voids created from perforating the white paper, and another reality, one represented with black matter. The immateriality of the perforated drawings, juxtaposed with dark paint, gives physicality to the shadows. According to Sard, “The visions of our inner self cast unexplored shadows, that despite invisibility, are essential elements of the human spirit”.

Amparo Sard was born in Mallorca in 1973. She has a Degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona, where she currently is a Professor. She has been granted amongst others, the Deutsche Bank International Award in 2000. The artist lives and works between Barcelona and Mallorca. Sard’s artworks can be found in numerous notable collections,such as the MoMa,New York; Guggenheim,New York; Deutsche Bank Berlin & New York, amongst many other institutional and private collections. Sard's recent institutional projects are La Otra (The Other), presented in the ABC Museum, Madrid,2013; Pareidolia at Es Baluard Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Mallorca,2013; In the spring of 2015 Sard will open a major solo show at the Museo d’arte contemporanea (Macro museum) in Rome.

We extend a very special thanks to the Government of Balearic Islands and the IEB (Institut d'Estudis Balearics) for realizing this project.

Karen Schiff will present “Symbolic Fields” drawings in our book vitrine. Her works read language and punctuation against the grain, asking viewers to reread text visually. She aims to restore writing to its original status as abstract drawing, with indeterminate meanings.

In the “Symbolic Fields” series, the artist uses rubber stamps of letters, numbers, and/or symbols to create carpet pages of text, on archival German stamp album paper. She then “annotates” the results to reveal patterns and highlight anomalies, so the field of illegible linguistic discourse becomes a field of indefinite visual space. This work draws upon Roland Barthes’s idea of “the rustle of language,” and Jan Verwoert’s suggestion that the writer's relation to language is like the experience of a cow, cooling in a pond. It also recalls the phenomenon of staring at a word for so long that it starts to seem nonsensical: the reliability of language is replaced by a sense of vertigo.

Schiff received her MFA in Studio Art (with Honors in Drawing) from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, and her PhD in Comparative Literature & Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. She has exhibited at Danese Gallery, NYC, bfAnnex Gallery, Boston; Schema Projects, Brooklyn and the Hafnarborg Museum, Iceland. Her drawings are in collections at Brown University (RI), Colby College (ME), the Harwood Museum of Art (NM), and the MCS Collection of Contemporary Drawing (Portugal), as well as the Werner H. and Sarah-Ann Kramarsky drawings collection (NYC). Her artist's project, Counter to Type, was published in the College Art Association's Spring 2014 Art Journal.

Cheim & Read is pleased to announce Landline, an exhibition of eight new paintings by the Irish-born American artist Sean Scully.

Begun in 2013, Scully’s Landline series resonates with newfound urgency and freedom. Thick horizontal bands of subtly-layered color provide his compositions with rhythmic pulse, while the interactions between striations of paint bristle with energy. While Scully’s canvases recall, on their surface, the contours of the actual landscapes that inspired them, they deepen along levels of recent personal experience and trauma—both physical and emotional.

Hatje Cantz’s publication of the book, Danto on Scully, will coincide with the Landline exhibition. In it, Danto’s essays on Scully’s work are assembled for the first time in one volume, with an introduction by Daniel Herwitz.

The retrospective, Follow the Heart: The Art of Sean Scully 1964–2014, curated by Philip Dodd, was on view at the Himalayas Art Museum, Shanghai from November through January. The exhibition will travel to the CAFA Museum, Beijing from March 13–April 23. Sean Scully is the first western abstract artist to be the subject of a museum tour in China. Other major upcoming exhibitions for the artist will be: the Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo from April 11–July 11, the Palazzo Falier, Venice from May 9–November 22 and the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin from May 12–September 20.

The intangible and physical forces that shape our planet have long been a subject of the arts. Despite the infinitesimal amount of time that humans have inhabited the earth we have gone from the discovery of fire to nuclear fusion and its scientific understanding. Still, many questions remain unanswered that have been validated in part through faith, be it through religious, philosophical or mystical means.

Andrew Erdos’ investigation into these constructs is the conceptual departure point for his new work, which attempts to depict them through sculpture and photography. His search began in the desert southwest at the mystical four corners of the Navajo Nation. He sought out the 25 million year old, monolith Shiprock, a geological anomaly which is said to be a sacred symbol of mythology, and is also the inspiration for the exhibitions central work: Mountain.

Mountain is a site specific sculpture that rises from the floor as if forced by tectonic energy. The piece is lit from within, and made by layering broken glass and other silica based detritus that Erdos collected from the land surrounding Shiprock. It is installed with ample room for visitors to circle it, and complete the piece by becoming an active participant.

Standing beside it like a sentinel is Red Mesa Eternal Beauty, a vitrine that contains preternatural fauna or perhaps some future outcome of natural selection. Its lineage is cryptic and it has a disarmingly humorous expression. The sculpture is mouth blown glass that is hand lined with sterling silver which reflects the surroundings back to the observer in an eternal loop.

Finally, Erdos confronts the viewer with a monumental arrangement of photographs that document each part of his exploration, offering the viewer insight into his sublime experience. The images are both breath-taking and thought provoking. Are we looking at the geological beginnings of time, or the abandoned skyline of a dystopic future?

Invaluable is Andrew Erdos second solo exhibition with Claire Oliver, and a continuation of his ongoing endeavour to create visual metaphors for the complex and enigmatic postulates of time, physics and faith.

Andrew Erdos, (b. 1985) graduated from The Institute for Electronic Art at Alfred University. His work is included in private and museum collections worldwide including The New Briton Museum of American Art, CT, 21C, NC and the Knoxville Museum of Art, KY. He has been awarded multiple residencies including The Corning Museum of Glass, NY and the Dagaocun Art District, Beijing. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn.

Through the lens of a camera, an object is captured. But what happens when you zoom in on an object to such a microscopic degree that the picture no longer resembles the thing it’s supposed to portray — or even its molecular components? The image collapses in on itself, until it is nothing more than a pixelated, flat plane that transmits no information.

The components of looking without really being able to see — the exact moment when visualization is neutered — are what Ernst Fischer aims to uncover through his practice. In his exhibition “18%,” at CUE Art Foundation, the Swiss-born artist presents works that “zoom in on details too numerous or too minute to humanly process or comprehend,” as he puts it. At the same time, he examines the mechanisms of looking embodied by motion pictures and photography.

He explains all of this in his studio in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The space, which he shares with figurative painter Matthew Watson, whom he met while in graduate school at Columbia University, is tucked inside a large industrial building marked by nothing but unmarked gray doors. Although Fischer and Watson work in divergent styles and mediums, one senses a close camaraderie between the artists. They bounce ideas off each other, sit down for lunch together, and will even lend each other a smartphone when necessary.

Fischer did not begin his career as a fine artist. After receiving technical training as a filmmaker in London, he spent nine years as a freelance commercial photographer, shooting successful ad campaigns for American Express, Volkswagen, Renault, Land Rover, Ford, Volvo and other major companies. While he excelled at taking photos of big machines, he also did editorial work for publications such as Dazed and Confused, Frieze, Graphic, The Guardian, Condé Nast Traveler, AnOther Man and I-D, and shot documentary footage for NGOs like Médecins Sans Frontières. All the while, Fischer maintained what he describes as a “quasi-secret lab practice.”

As a fourth-generation creator — his father, Kaspar Fischer, was an actor, writer and sculptor, and his grandfather, Hans “Fis” Fischer, was a well-known painter and illustrator of children’s books — Ernst says that he “ran a mile from any situation in which I’d have to call myself ‘artist’ for most of my working life.”

Fischer’s experience as a commercial photographer led to an exploration of his relationship with the camera, which he calls “the machine.” Almost as if he wanted to destroy that relationship, he developed a microphotography rig that allows him to capture images that are between five and 50 times larger on the focal plane than they are in the real world. These objects vary from minerals to caviar to leeches. (He jokes that microphotography is only practiced by 60-year-old men in their backyard sheds . . . and himself.)

Using the rig to move the lens closer and closer to his subject, he takes hundreds of digital photographs at increasingly miniscule depths, which he then feeds en masse into a computer program that attempts to extrapolate information from the data to reconstitute a seamless rendering of the object. In subverting this process, Fischer ”cracks” the algorithm, which can interpret neither the specular highlights captured by the lens nor the sheer wealth of data. Instead of an extraordinarily detailed composite of the object, the computer spits out a flat image that resembles a topographical map. What Fischer hopes these images reveal is that machines, which are supposed to be able to emulate anything, including human vision, are just machines in the end. They cannot reproduce the mechanisms of “seeing.” They have limits. There’s something profoundly reassuring about that.

In “18%,” Fischer brings these explorations a step further. Rather than taking pictures of an object itself, he focuses on the reflection of the light source that illuminates it. “The object is circumscribed, like the black hole that can only be ‘seen’ by virtue of it bending the light that passes close by it,” he explains.

The resulting images, which include a series of refractions through zinc crystals, vary from resembling oil slicks to screen noise to melting objects. He describes them as looking very “Goya.” Comparisons to Romantic painters, and, more specifically German Romantic painters, arise frequently in Fischer’s explanations of his own work, almost always followed by an apology. He describes such examples as schlocky and says that any move toward painterliness is preconscious.

But he need not apologize. Both the Romantics and Fischer are interested in the same thing: the sublime. The space where something is transformed beyond all calculations and imitations. The moment of the divine. In the end, the quest to find this point of transfiguration is so beautifully human that the act itself is sublime.

In a cinemascope-format video projected on the front window of the gallery, Fischer has processed 3,500 jpegs he downloaded from the White Nationalist web forum Stormfront.org. He first began studying a thread of images on the site, published under the headline “post your all-time favorite piece of visual art,” after reading a 2014 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center that links Stormfront members to almost 100 ideologically motivated murders. The images mostly show works by Salvador Dalí, M. C. Escher, the Pre-Raphaelites and, yes, Romantic landscapes painted by John Martin and Caspar David Friedrich. And so, using a frame-blending algorithm, Fischer has fashioned a flickering, fragmented, hypnotically pulsating film out of the pictures — an unplaceable tableau that forms a “rich void.”

To explain why he did this, Fischer uses a quote from Brecht: “Don’t start from the good old things but the bad new ones.” The questions Brecht’s aphorism raises for Fischer include, “What constitutes good and bad?” And, “When considering the supremacy of the white male in cultural production and society at large, what can a white male artist create that is neither ironic nor despicable?”

Perhaps Fischer’s ambivalence about this last question drives other aspects of his work. He may feel that he cannot create anything that would be read by others without a critical bent, so it would seem he produces voids that cannot be read at all. Another example of this is a series of images framed using acrylic panels that he culled from discarded flat-screen televisions. The screen elements have patterns of white dots that get denser toward the center and function to frustrate a clear view of the photographs.

In total, the exhibition represents a glimpse of the infinite, and in the same breath a nihilistic impulse. No matter how close we get to the source of something, ultimately, much of the universe remains beyond our comprehension. An artist’s task, arguably, is to capture the moment of slippage when an object starts to shimmer near the void.

Brienne Walsh is a writer and critic who has contributed to Art in America, ArtReview, Modern Painters, Interview, The New York Times, The Village Voice, PDN, Architectural Digest, Departures and Paper, among other publications. She is currently working on a book of essays.

Jim Krantz occupies a unique place in the history of contemporary art and photography. His pictures of cowboys were re-photographed by Richard Prince and became not only the highest-selling images ever to be auctioned, but were used as banners by the Guggenheim Museum when they held their 2007 mid-career retrospective of Prince’s work.

It was not an accident that Krantz’s work was selected by Prince. Krantz had studied with Ansel Adams and Paul Caponigro, and since the 1980s had been mixing his personal work with assignments and campaigns for companies from Samsung to the U.S. Marines. Focusing largely on the American West, Krantz is known for his combination of technical skill and the emotive resonance of his imagery. He is constantly pushing the boundaries of the medium using every format from traditional cameras to drones.

Recently, Krantz has collaborated with Neville Wakefield - former Senior Curatorial Advisor for PS1 MoMA and Curator of Frieze - on projects ranging from a Western portfolio shot for Adam Kimmel to the recent contemporary art edition of Playboy

Julian Wasser started his career in photography in the Washington DC bureau of the Associated Press where he met and accompanied the famous news photographer Weegee – who would become a lasting influence on him. In the mid-60s Wasser moved to Los Angeles as a contract photographer for TIME, LIFE, and FORTUNE magazines and becoming internationally known as the go to guy for getting candid but memorably composed photographs. (His iconic images of Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston; Marcel Duchamp and Eve Babitz; and a young Jodie Foster are already classics.)

In 1968 TIME Magazine assigned Wasser to go to the home of the young writer Joan Didion whose book Slouching Towards Bethlehem was becoming a literary sensation. Wasser posed Didion with her recently acquired yellow Corvette Stingray and the resulting photographs became such icons of style that they inspired the fashion house Celine to do a campaign with the model Daria Werbowy posing in the window of a car just like Didion.

For our Project Room show – the gallery will be exhibiting selected published images as well as outtakes and never before seen contact sheets of the Didion shoot.